62 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Beauty of face still carries far too much weight as a desideratum 

 for matrimony, but this quality is not without some eugenic value. 

 Far more serious is the modern tendency to substitute for mere beauty 

 another characteristic which, for want of a better name, we may term 

 flashiness. In our sober moments we all recognize the flashy man or 

 woman as per se inferior, but it is undeniable that, other things 

 being equal, the matrimonial chances of this class are above, rather 

 than below the average. There is hope in the consideration that 

 this demand is largely artificial, stimulated by the press, the popular 

 magazine, and, above all, the stage. A moment's recollection of the 

 standard of sexual desirability displayed in the ordinary farce will il- 

 lustrate forcibly the disparity between the artificial qualities there 

 emphasized and the characteristics really desired by the general public 

 in wife or husband. 



Along with a shifting of values from this false emphasis there is 

 needed the general cultivation of conscious selection, this again de- 

 pending largely upon the attitude of the press and the stage. While a 

 large percentage of our current witticisms inculcate the cynical, and 

 many of our novels and plays, the fatalistic view of marriage, it is not 

 to be wondered at that sexual selection still falls far short of the ideal. 



Although an elevation of standard is of preeminent value not only 

 for eugenic, but for social progress, it is obvious that too rigid a cri- 

 terion might have the effect of leaving many desirables unmated. We 

 must balance this tendency, therefore, by doing away with certain ob- 

 stacles to free sexual selection which have hitherto worked to produce 

 celibacy in superior men and women. 



Social caste lines, for example, if closely drawn, tend to leave un- 

 married many individuals who, though unable to find mates in their 

 own class, might easily do so in another : the diplomat's daughter whom 

 propriety forbids to fall in love with her father's secretary, and the 

 butler's daughter to whom exceptional endowment has made distasteful 

 the suitors of her own walk of life, are alike the victims of convention, 

 their line being extinguished in this way as effectively as if they were 

 undesirables. 



Extreme inequality of wealth has an even more unfortunate effect, 

 as confining choice within limits much more arbitrary than those of 

 hereditary class, and thus keeping possible mates in widely distant 

 spheres. Such luxuries as the parlor car, the country estate and the 

 many-barriered ocean steamer have fixed a gulf between the millionaire 

 and the lower middle class that is seldom traversed matrimonially ex- 

 cept through the medium of the stage. 



While the legislative interests of the eugenicist and the social re- 

 former here again coincide in their common opposition to extreme in- 

 equalities of wealth and rank, something may be accomplished even 



